Researching The Beloved Dead

Tony Hays is the author of an historical series based on the Arthurian legends and featuring Malgwyn ap Cuneglas, a hardened soldier who lost his sword arm fighting alongside Arthur in battle against the Saxons in the mid-5th century AD.

Tony's background doesn't seem likely fodder for such a series: raised on a Tennessee farm; spending time first as a university administrator and then serving on the State Department-sponsored Overseas Security Advisory Council; even sailing on board the USS Tortuga to the Horn of Africa during its 2002-2003 deployment in preparation for the War with Iraq as an unofficial Arab linguist.

But one of Tony's passions has always been writing, which encouraged him to get an MA degree in English/Creative Writing at Texas A&M University at Commerce in 1991 and turn his hand to another passion, historical mysteries. The first two volumes in his Dark Ages series received starred reviews from Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly, and Deadly Pleasures magazine named The Divine Sacrifice one of the best new mysteries of 2010.

In the just-released third installment of the series, The Beloved Dead, Tony merges a suspenseful serial killer story line with a detailed recreation of fifth-century Britain, as Arthur sends his chief advisor Malgwyn to fetch the bride-to-be for Arthur's politically-expedient marriage. Along the way, Malgwyn gets caught up in the search for a savage murderer, who sexually abuses young girls before slitting their throats. The investigator has to wonder whether the killings, which reawaken painful memories from his own past, are aimed at destabilizing Arthur's authority. Arthur's love for Malgwyn's cousin, Guinevere, only exacerbates tension between Malgwyn and the legendary king.

As a new feature of In Reference to Murder, I'll be asking authors about their approach to research while writing their novels, be it through job shadowing, burrowing into library stacks, going online, interviews, news reports, or whatever other techniques and methods they use in getting the details just right. Or whether too much research and overplanning can be deadly to a manuscript.  Since he is a writer of historical fiction, it seemed particularly fitting to ask Tony about his thoughts on research, especially while he's on a blog tour to promote The Beloved Dead.

Tony Hays:

When is too much too much?

I've in been in the historical mystery genre, for a long times it seems. But the kind of research I do isn't really the kind most scholars do. I am a novelist, an historical novelist, and that puts some pretty tough restrictions on us.

Too much, and you're pedantic. Too little and you're not taken seriously. Over the course of my writing career I have often studied that fine line between two much and two little research writing. The easy answer is to have some sort research meter that sets off an alarm. Or I have an inner gauge.

The real answer?

I have no answer. There is no cut-and-dried method for striking the right balance.  It's completely a gut call. Sometimes we're right. Sometimes we're wrong.

In my book,The Killing Way, I think I edge toward too much historical detail. But the Dark Ages is a time that we know little about. So, every detail I could drag from the historical record, and every archaeological discovery, I used, with as soft a touch as I could, brought the time to me. But by the time of The Beloved Dead, my newest entry in the century, I believe that I'm developing a seventh sense, a little twitch in my eye that says , "hold on. Do I really need that there?"

I vote for straightforward description, not a page on how a toga looked or a page on how a dress hung over a Celtic princess. If you spend more time describing how the Celtic princess looked, the nobility in the slope of her neck, you'll be in better shape, than if you had spent a week in the library studying Celtic fabrics and dying methods. Because you will have drawn the reader's attention to the character, not the trappings.

Undoubtedly, trappings and the proper geography and weapons are important. But it will be our characters that act upon that historical setting. So, as much as you research about the landscape and those "trappings," you need to know how common people lived, and breathed, and thought. Fiction, historical or otherwise, is predominantly about the people on that landscape. You can see it is about a city as in Rutherfurd's London or Sarum, but in the end you have to have people to make them special.

I'm not certain that I have enlightened you at all. The post was supposed to deal with when is too much too much. The bottom line is that writers have to make those choices for themselves, but it is an evolving process. You won't get it right, necessarily the first, second or third time out, but you will grow as an author and ultimately make better decisions.

Now that was the historical part.  Research for a mystery is a different kettle of fish.  I'm not sure you can know too much. You certainly might not use all of it in your writing, but you need to know it, because it might form a hole in the logic of your solution. The solution may rest on a particular cut to a rare gem. Perhaps such a gem can only sustain two types of cut, you think. But in your research you find that on very special occasions, it can sustain a third type of cut. And that may make all the difference.

A mystery is about hiding things.  The more you know, the more you can manipulate those things to make the mystery edgy, tense, satisfying.

Research is an odd creature, sometimes with a life of its own.  But it is a creature, nonetheless, one that mystery writers of all walks must learn how to utilize.